2024 Festival Guests, Jurors, and GGA Screeners

Peabody award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand is best known for her open-hearted, artfully self-deprecating, and very transparent approach to nonfiction filmmaking. Over the past 30 years she’s evolved her unique first-person voice and signature brand of “toxic comedy,” each film and engagement campaign building on the next, including A Healthy Baby Girl (Sundance 1997/POV), its sequel Blue Vinyl (Sundance/ 2002/HBO), Everything’s Cool (Sundance 2007) and her incredibly prescient feature Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, which was broadcast on PBS/Independent Lens in 2020 and prompted the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to award Helfand their 2019 Freedom of Expression Award. Her short, Love & Stuff, produced especially for NYT Op-Docs for Mothers Day 2014, hit a nerve and is still the “laugh till you cry short to forward to your friends right after/but even better before their parents die.” Love & Stuff, the subsequent feature, premiered nationally on POV in September 2022. Helfand’s newest project, will be her first foray into multimedia nonfiction storytelling with Good Mourning Ethel taking the form of a feature documentary, investigative radio piece, and live cinema performance. As much a filmmaker as she is a committed field-builder, Helfand co-founded two field-changing nonfiction organizations, Working Films in 1999 and Chicken & Egg Pictures in 2005, and over the last five years helped produce, design, and moderate a range of intensive pitch training/storytelling workshops. She has found great joy teaching documentary inside graduate journalism programs as guest professor at Columbia J School and the J School at CUNY. She lives in NYC with her soon to be 10-year-old daughter Theo and their pandemic bunny Coco.

Grammy nominated and Emmy-winning director and producer Lisa Cortés generates bold, explosive art that shines light on important stories hidden from view. From executive-producing the Academy Award®-winning film, Precious, to producing and directing 2023’s “enthralling documentary” (Variety) about Little Richard, Lisa sparks cultural change through works of unrivaled excellence. Little Richard: I Am Everything premiered as the opening night selection in the US documentary competition at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for 26 awards. Also premiering at Sundance was Invisible Beauty which she produced. The Space Race premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Cortés directed and produced this gripping saga of African American astronauts at NASA and in space. In 2020, Cortés directed and produced All In: The Fight For Democracy, tracing the violent history of the voting rights struggle. Emmy-winning HBO documentary, The Apollo (2019), which Cortés produced, explores African American cultural and political history through the story of the legendary Apollo Theater. Cortés executive produced Precious (2009) which was nominated for six Academy Awards® and won two. The film received the Sundance Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize for best drama. Her film productions have received over 100 international awards and nominations.

Laura Kim serves as Co-Head of Campaigns & Engagement for Participant. Kim has been instrumental to the success of the company’s features and series, including Academy Award®-winning Roma, American Factory, A Fantastic Woman, Spotlight, and Citizenfour, as well as the Academy Award-nominated films All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, historic triple nominee Flee, Collective, and The Look of Silence. Prior to Participant, Kim founded Inside Job, a marketing/distribution consulting firm, and handled Academy Award-nominated films Restrepo, Winter’s Bone, The Act of Killing, and Stories We Tell. Before that she served as EVP of Marketing for Warner Independent Pictures, where she was responsible for films that included Before Sunset, March of the Penguins, Paradise Now, and Good Night, and Good Luck. Prior to Warner Independent, Kim worked on numerous campaigns at MPRM, where she represented Sundance Institute, Good Machine, Strand Releasing, and others. Kim serves as a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on the Board of Directors for Film Independent, and is a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She co-wrote I Wake Up Screening: What to Do Once You’ve Made That Movie with John Anderson.

Joanne Parsont just recently ended a seven-year tenure as the Director of Education at the California Film Institute, providing year-round programs to youth and community members to learn about themselves and the world through film. Joanne is a media education specialist and film festival programmer specializing in children’s and documentary films, with over 28 years of experience with film festivals and film arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationwide, including a five-year stint as the first Director of Education at the San Francisco Film Society (now SFFILM). She served on the Board of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) from 2015-2020.

Joel Serin-Christ is a filmmaker and the founder and CEO of Collective Focus Films, a documentary film company that creates branded and original films to inspire social change and environmental conservation. His films have been screened widely, including previous selections to the San Francisco International Film Festival. Joel has over a decade of documentary filmmaking experience, which started during his undergraduate coursework at the University of California, Santa Barbara and continued through his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He then launched the documentary film studio within Teach For America’s magazine, One Day. Throughout his training and experience Joel has focused on using documentary films to explore topics related to social justice, education, and ocean conservation. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.

A self-described story teller and co-founder of Artfarm Productions, Pete Barma is a director committed to bringing fresh stories from their perspective as a queer non-binary person to the screen. As an award winning out LGBTQ+ educator, they spent the last 30 years teaching literacy and understand the craft of story telling inside and out. In their role as educator, they also founded LGBTQ+ and ally student clubs to help support and educate young people in the Bay Area, and frequently guest speak on the subject. In 2019, they co-directed their first feature length documentary, Through The Windows, which premiered at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco to a sold out audience. Their current focus is to continue to open the lens on the marginalized communities who have not typically appeared on screen. As such, they wrote the award winning autobiographical screenplay Pete, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2022 and was Oscar Shortlisted in 2024. They continue to work on a series of queer stories.

Alexis Gambis is a French-Venezuelan filmmaker and biologist. His films combine documentary and fiction, often embracing animal perspectives and transforming data into dreams. Streaming on HBO Max and a New York Times Critics’ Pick, his latest feature Son of Monarchs premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival where it received the Sloan Feature Film Prize. He is the founder of Labocine, a streaming platform showcasing cinema from the Science New Wave and providing tools to bridge the worlds of arts + sciences. For over 15 years, he has also been the artistic director of the Science New Wave Festival, a singular New York film festival that showcases the latest crop of scientific narratives on screen. At New York University, he teaches interdisciplinary courses at the intersection of biology and filmmaking. Alexis is currently on a fellowship at Harvard’s Film Study Center where he is developing his next project: a docu-fiction series El Beso Protoplasmático inspired by the life, artworks and science fiction writings of the father of modern neuroscience Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Born and raised in New York, IndieWire Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson has been a contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, the Observer, and Wired. She has served as film columnist at Variety and deputy editor of Variety.com, where her daily blog, Thompson on Hollywood, launched in March 2007. Anne was the Deputy Film Editor at the Hollywood Reporter, the West Coast Editor of Premiere, a Senior Writer at Entertainment Weekly, and West Coast Editor for Film Comment. She wrote the film-industry column Risky Business for L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times syndicate. A graduate of the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, she has taught film criticism at USC and curated the fall semester of “Sneak Previews” for UCLA Extension, and currently co-hosts the weekly podcast Screen Talk with Ryan Lattanzio. In 2014, HarperCollins published her book, “The $11 Billion Year: From Sundance to the Oscars, an Inside Look at the Changing Hollywood System.” Follow her @akstanwyck.

Laura Michalchyshyn is a producer and most recently Chief Creative Officer at Blue Ant Media. Based in New York, she develops and produces across a number of genres. A passionate creative, she recently executive produced The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks, Prince Andrew: Banished, and Epstein’s Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell. Michalchyshyn brought Ru Paul’s Drag Race to Canada with creators World of Wonder and executive produces three franchises, including Canada’s Drag Race, Canada Vs World, and Slaycation. Independently, she recently produced Jerry Brown: The Disrupter and two Dawn Porter documentaries, the NAACP Award-winning and Emmy-nominated John Lewis: Good Trouble and Bobby Kennedy for President. Previously, Michalchyshyn co-founded Sundance Productions with Robert Redford, where she served as president and executive produced projects including CNN’s Death Row Stories and HBO’s Emmy Award-winning Momentum Generation. She has held senior executive roles in the United States and Canada for Sundance Channel, Alliance Atlantis Media, and Discovery. Her accolades include three News and Documentary Emmys, a Sports Emmy, several Canadian Screen Awards and awards from GLAAD, the International Documentary Association (IDA), and a Peabody.

My name is Dillon Ford and I am a current sophomore at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts for Film. I am an aspiring filmmaker and cinematographer. I grew up in SF and love the film community here! Ever since I have immersed myself in film I have been so thrilled to meet new people, explore new perspectives, and build my portfolio in hopes of pursuing my goals.

Logan Ragland is a senior at Lowell High School in San Francisco. He first began his dive into film three years ago, and immediately fell in love with its power for communicating emotion as well as the complexities of people and their relationships. He founded a film club at Lowell in 2022, and has been involved with SF Art & Film’s film workshop for the past year, working on several short films. While his primary focus is studying film as a form of literature, he also loves photography, music, and the ways in which technical elements like shot composition and color can be used to convey characters’ emotions and a work’s themes as a whole. He will be attending Swarthmore College in the fall, and looks forward to studying film, English, political science, and everything in between over the course of the next four years.

Osinachi Ibe is a writer, filmmaker, and film programmer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Osinachi earned her MFA in Film Directing from Chapman University where she received a graduate fellowship. She is a recipient of the 2022 Sundance Uprise Grant Fund and received second round consideration for Sundance Institute’s 2023 Development Track. Osinachi was a filmmaker in residence in SFFILM’s 2023 FilmHouse Residency and an artist in residence in Headlands Center for the Arts 2023 Artist in Residence Program. She is currently a filmmaker in residence in SFFILM’s 2024 FilmHouse Residency where she is developing her narrative feature film, Karolina and Udochi Dance in the Woods at Dusk!.

Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green is a Bay Area native and performing artist. In 2020 she joined the SFFILM community participating in the Nellie Wong Magic of Movies Essay Contest winning first place in the middle school category. This was the start of her exploration of filmmaking. Starting in 2021, Sumayyah has attended SFFILM’s Youth Filmmakers Camp every summer consecutively. Nuriddin-Green is making her Hollywood debut voicing “Bree” in Disney Pixar’s Inside Out 2, this summer. This Bay Area teen is passionate about making art on and off screen and stage, is honored to be a youth juror and hopes you continue to follow her journey @allaboutsumayyah on Instagram.

Andrew Hahn is a Creative Executive at Netflix. He’s spent the past six years on the Documentary team, working with a wide array of filmmakers across various projects including Rory Kennedy’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, Vox’s Explained series, Morgan Neville and Jeff Malmberg’s The Saint of Second Chances, and, most recently, Bitconned by Bryan Storkel and Chris Smith. Andrew also works across development and acquisitions, recently acquiring Benjamin Ree’s touching Ibelin out of Sundance. In a previous life, Andrew worked at ABC, helping to oversee Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Aurora Brachman is an award-winning documentary director and cinematographer. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Through patient and poetic storytelling, her films explore narratives of intimate relationships within families and communities. Her short documentaries, including Club Quarantine, Joychild, Still Waters, and The Gallery That Destroys All Shame, have been acquired by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and POV; shortlisted for an IDA Award; selected for Vimeo Staff Picks; exhibited at the MoMA, and screened at numerous festivals including Sundance, True/False, Hot Docs, BlackStar, and SFFILM. Aurora is a graduate of the MFA program in Documentary Film at Stanford University, a 2020 Sundance Ignite Fellow, a 2023 SFFILM FilmHouse Resident, and a 2023 BAVC MediaMaker Fellow. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in filmmaking. She associate produced the A24 documentary Underrated (Sundance 2023); co-produced Apple TV+’s Girls State (Sundance 2024); and assisted on the critically acclaimed Showtime docuseries Couples Therapy. Aurora primarily makes work about the experiences of Black, brown, and Queer people and is committed to collaborative and ethical storytelling.

Ash Hoyle is a features Programmer at the Sundance Film Festival. He focuses on fiction, nonfiction, and Midnight. He previously worked at Sundance as an Associate Programmer for shorts and features and to support Director of Programming Kim Yutani. Ash was also the Director of Programming of Damn These Heels Film Festival, run by the Utah Film Center, as well as a Senior Programmer at Outfest Los Angeles and a Programmer at Palm Springs Shorts Fest. Ash is a 2021 Project Involve Fellow on Film Independent’s programming track and has also been involved in programming NewFest NY, Sun Valley Film Festival, Overlook Film Festival, and AFI Fest. He worked in production at ABC, Mssng Peces, and The Annoyance Theater. Ash is originally from Philadelphia, PA, and holds a dual degree in Film and English from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.